A web-based tool for multi-task natural language annotation
Antarlekhaka is a comprehensive web-based annotation tool designed for multi-task natural language annotation workflows. It supports simultaneous annotation across multiple NLP tasks within a single interface, making it practical for projects that require layered or parallel annotation schemes.
Future Work
LLM-assisted pre-annotation to reduce manual effort
Inter-annotator agreement metrics and adjudication workflows
Support for span-level and cross-sentence annotation tasks
Export to standardised formats (CoNLL, BRAT, WebAnno)
References
2023
NLP-OSS ’23
Antarlekhaka: A Comprehensive Tool for Multi-task Natural Language Annotation
One of the primary obstacles in the advancement of Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies for low-resource languages is the lack of annotated datasets for training and testing machine learning models. In this paper, we present \\textitAntarlekhaka, a tool for manual annotation of a comprehensive set of tasks relevant to NLP. The tool is Unicode-compatible, language-agnostic, Web-deployable and supports distributed annotation by multiple simultaneous annotators. The system sports user-friendly interfaces for 8 categories of annotation tasks. These, in turn, enable the annotation of a considerably larger set of NLP tasks. The task categories include two linguistic tasks not handled by any other tool, namely, sentence boundary detection and deciding canonical word order, which are important tasks for text that is in the form of poetry. We propose the idea of \\textitsequential annotation based on small text units, where an annotator performs several tasks related to a single text unit before proceeding to the next unit. The research applications of the proposed mode of multi-task annotation are also discussed. Antarlekhaka outperforms other annotation tools in objective evaluation. It has been also used for two real-life annotation tasks on two different languages, namely, Sanskrit and Bengali. The tool is available at \\urlhttps://github.com/Antarlekhaka/code
@inproceedings{terdalkar2023antarlekhaka,title={Antarlekhaka: A Comprehensive Tool for Multi-task Natural Language Annotation},author={Terdalkar, Hrishikesh and Bhattacharya, Arnab},booktitle={Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop for Natural Language Processing Open Source Software (NLP-OSS 2023)},month=dec,year={2023},address={Singapore},publisher={Association for Computational Linguistics},url={https://aclanthology.org/2023.nlposs-1.23},doi={10.18653/v1/2023.nlposs-1.23},pages={199--211},}